Lady Joker, Volume 1 by Kaoru Takamura (lightest ebook reader .txt) 📕

the seeds in a week or so, he suddenly wondered, when these blue morning glories bloomed next year, where would he be and what would he be thinking? Even if he were to get his hands on a large sum of money, for a man who would be seventy, a life of revelry and luxury was utterly unnecessary, and with the most important thing—a sense of peace in his heart—moving ever further away from him, by this time next year, perhaps he would be an even more wretched fiend than he was now.

Monoi contemplated this and, resolving that at least he would no longer live the life of an animal, he murmured to himself, That would be good enough for me.

4

Shuhei Handa

Soon after the autumn equinox, there was an unusual drop in the incidence of violent crime, and Shuhei Handa took this opportunity to start seeing a dentist he knew near Kamata Station, making the excuse to those around him, “This is the only chance I have to get my teeth fixed.” Since his police department was being renovated and he was working out of a temporary office building in Hon-Haneda, his visits to the dentist became a good pretext for him to sneak off further afield. Handa also scrounged time from his comings and goings to make gradual contact with his conspirators.

At the end of September, just as their plan had started to take shape, on his usual way to the dentist Handa met up with Katsumi Koh. Whenever Koh was out making daytime rounds on sales calls, he always appeared in the three-piece ensemble of a modern Japanese banker-man: black briefcase, motorcycle, and helmet. He thought these made him conspicuous, so Koh made sure to leave his bike a little distance away.

When Handa met up with Koh at a coffee shop in a crowded shopping district on the west side of Kamata Station, the conversation bluntly got down to the question of how much money they would take from their target. As he ate his curry rice garnished with bright red pickled relish, Koh replied, “As much as we want.” Then he added, “Hinode’s got money to burn. They can get it from anywhere.”

“You don’t say. But how do you know?”

“It’s obvious. Look at this.” Koh thrust toward Handa the publicly listed company asset securities report that had been tucked inside the weekly magazine he was carrying. It was a slim, orange pamphlet titled Hinode Beer Company.

“Take a look at the category ‘Cash and Deposits’ at the very top of the assets section on the balance sheet.”

“163.2 billion yen . . .”

“The number from the previous term is next to it. Compare the two, and you’ll see there’s about a thirty-billion increase. That means money is going in and out by the tens of billions. That cash-and-deposits category lists the instantaneous number at the end of the term on December thirty-first, which doesn’t mean that same exact amount will be sitting in their bank account come January first. For a corporation with as many assets as Hinode, the sums of money they’re moving around is on a whole different scale—that much becomes clear just by looking at their financial statements.”

“So because they’re moving around huge amounts of money, we can take as much as we want?”

“Basically. For instance, below that same category do you see where it says ‘Other Current Assets’? It says ‘other’ because they’ve thrown various types of accounting in there. Short-term loans and reimbursements, temporary advances for travel and business trip expenses, unpaid bills, down payments, and so on. I can’t tell what type of money it is unless I see the actual ledger, but you can bet that there’s money caught up in there whose actual purpose is impossible for anyone on the outside to know. The fact that they have seventeen billion yen worth of it there—well, they’re in a league of their own.”

“You said they can get money from anywhere, but where, for instance, would it come from?”

“That’s Hinode’s problem.”

“But say you were in charge of finance at Hinode, how and from where would you get the money? If word got out to the public and to the police that Hinode had caved to criminal demands and coughed up the money, they’d lose their credibility—so they’d need to raise a slush fund without anyone on the outside being the wiser. Now, how would you do that?”

“It depends on the amount, but if it’s a matter of two or three hundred million, I would create a random expense item and charge it as a temporary advance, like the one I just mentioned. As for adjusting the account afterward, I would wait until things calm down and then chalk it up little by little as a deductible expense.”

Koh talked as if this were the easiest thing in the world. “Let’s see, what else . . .” He drew the pamphlet back toward himself. “A common nest for a slush fund is ‘Construction Suspense Account’ under fixed assets. Hinode’s got fifty billion in there this period. Huge, right? When they construct factories or other buildings, they make deals with contractors so that, for example, they can write up the price they’ve padded with an extra billion yen as a construction startup fee under this heading, and that’ll be the end of story. What else . . .”

Koh let his fingers trail lightly over the balance sheet and, mumbling, “This is good too,” paused in the middle of the section on liabilities. “This category called ‘Deposits Payable’ is also useful. See, a beer company pays taxes based on shipments. To insure against the possibility of a client going bankrupt before they can settle their account, they always take a deposit, and this is the category where they record such deposits. For example, Hinode deals with some sixty subsidiaries and affiliated companies, right? Under the guise of a joint marketing fund, they could make each company contribute fifty million, which comes out to three